Jeff O'Brien is an art historian and curator whose work takes the archive as its central problem: what images and histories archival systems make visible, and what they suppress or fail to record. He is curator of MIRL, the Material / Image Research Lab in the Department of History of Art & Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he leads interdisciplinary projects that investigate the shifting relationship between digital images, analogue objects, and the archives that structure meaning. There he directs the California Native American Modern Art Archive, a post-custodial initiative built in collaboration with Native artists and communities under Indigenous data sovereignty.
His ongoing research on contemporary art and visual culture in the Middle East examines how artists mobilize lens-based practices and archival materials to interrogate questions of visibility, representation, and the conditions under which bodies, histories, and communities appear or disappear. This research draws on close, sustained work with archives and collections in Lebanon, at the Arab Image Foundation, Ashkal Alwan, and the Sursock Museum in Beirut, and on a fellowship in Modern and Contemporary Arab Art at Darat al Funun in Amman. His own photographic documentation of Lifta, a depopulated Palestinian village on the western edge of Jerusalem, carries this research into a sustained documentary practice. He also builds open instruments for archives and heritage after crisis: tools for securing at-risk media, cataloguing absence, and documenting condition and provenance.
He was a Liu Scholar at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia, and has held a Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He is co-editor of What Are Our Supports? (Information Office, 2022), a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award. He serves on the editorial board of Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, has acted as juror for the California Arts Council and the J.M.K. Innovation Prize, and has presented his research across the United States, Canada, and the Middle East.